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Apple Now Faces 26+ Lawsuits for 'Purposefully' or 'Secretly' Slowing Down Older iPhones

stevet said:
actually, thats not necessarily true. They have to prove that apple's slowing down the phones led people to upgrade their slow phones.

The fact that they issued a battery program for the 6s in a limited serial number range is the denial. they had to have known they had a bigger problem.
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That's exactly what I said...

Apple2GS said:
The is like a car company turning off 2 cylinders instead of telling the owner that they need a $29 part.
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The two situations are not even remotely similar, because a car engine is nothing like a battery. If you want to run with the car comparison, it would be like Tesla scaling back acceleration on their cars in cold temperatures/when the battery is degraded instead of allowing the car to shut down in the middle of the highway. In that instance I would much prefer the former.

And the battery replacement was $79 before this month.
 
mi7chy said:
The simpler and proper method would've been to pop up a battery health notification allowing the owner to book an appointment to get the battery serviced and, optionally, run under throttled performance until the appointment date. The fact that there were no transparency nor attempt to fix the root cause with the defective battery proves malice.
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100% agree. I hate the fact they need to hook up my phone to their system to check the state of the battery and I have to waste time going in if I have battery issues that may or may not qualify for replacement. Maybe all this will end up making the state of your battery a bit more transparent. Either way I don't think Apple had any type of ill intent with what they did as others are implying.
 
MacsRuleOthersDrool said:
Or maybe, just maybe, the CPUs and GPUs got more powerful, and Apple miscalculated what that COULD mean as batteries aged.

It is not in the average engineering team's mind to be overly concerned with what happens in a product two years down the road.

Hindsight is 20/20. Even in Product Design.
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Maybe, maybe not. They have huge amounts of data from both the phones, the CPU manufacturers, (themselves?), and the battery manufacturers.
You know when you spec an ELU what you are supposed to do is spec the battery for 3 hours at the end of the battery life. Not three hours for a new battery.
I believe that Apple had an idea of how much their customers would use and how often they thought people would charge their phones, they could have asked and probably did, "Hi Mr. Battery Manufacturer. How long will this battery be expected to last under X conditions?". They got this part wrong. That's fine, we all get things wrong.
The cover up is where it all begins to stink.
 
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Seems to me Apple did indicate (here) with the release of 10.2.1 that power management was altered, but the media was more interested in reporting on emojis and the rumoured "theatre mode"...

At what point should users blame their various news outlets for not looking further into the details of the release instead of rehashing the generic release notes? Isn't that why journalism exists? If I saw, "Various bug fixes" as a reporter, I'd probably look into what bugs were fixed. *shrug*
 
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SideStepSociety said:
Seems to me Apple did indicate (here) with the release of 10.2.1 that power management was altered, but the media was more interested in reporting on emojis and the rumoured "theatre mode"...

At what point should users blame their various news outlets for not looking further into the details of the release instead of rehashing the generic release notes? Isn't that why journalism exists? If I saw, "Various bug fixes" as a reporter, I'd probably look into what bugs were fixed. *shrug*
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But why did they tell people the battery was fine then?
 
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So who is gonna tell these people that when you put your phone in your pocket and you're not using it, the processor throttles down to save battery... I'm sure they didn't pay for a fast phone just so it can throttle to "save power" when they are not using it. o_O :D
 
Joe Rossignol said:
I don't have a worldwide list, but here are the ones in the United States. There are some duplicates. This information is from PACER, which costs money to access.

In no particular order, here are the last names of the slowdown lawsuits:

1 - Hakimi
2 - Rabinovits
3 - Harvey
4 - Gallmann
5 - Mailyan
6 - Drantivy
7 - Lazarus
8 - Neilan
9 - Miller
10 - Batista
11 - LaNasa
12 - Schroeder
13 - Burton
14 - McInnis
15 - Mohammed
16 - Bogdanovich
17 - Mangano
18 - Sullivan-Stefanou
19 - Honigman
20 - Cook
21 - Aburos
22 - Mallh
23 - McInnis

View attachment 745387 View attachment 745388 View attachment 745389
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What in the HELL are two of those Lawsuits doing in BANKRUPTCY COURT?!?
 
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Absent the code inserted by Apple, the reduced battery capacity of these phones would not have negatively affected processing performance.

Patently false, as the phone would otherwise stop completely in the event of a large power draw using an old battery. These guys are wasting a load of money on a case that they can't win.
 
jarman92 said:
The two situations are not even remotely similar, because a car engine is nothing like a battery. If you want to run with the car comparison, it would be like Tesla scaling back acceleration on their cars in cold temperatures/when the battery is degraded instead of allowing the car to shut down in the middle of the highway. In that instance I would much prefer the former.
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No, it would be like Tesla giving you batteries that aren't capable of running the car at the acceleration promised unless the batteries are brand new, so when the car is 12 months old and the battery health dips to 95% they install a stealth firmware patch that scales back the acceleration.

Then when customers take the car in and complain about the poor performance, the Tesla maintenance staff tells them the car and battery are fine, and if they aren't happy with the acceleration, they should buy the newer model with 20% more power. All while pretending they didn't reduce the car's performance on purpose for any reason.
 
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AronDraws said:
I understand a battery will age but what makes me so upset is that my battery was tested as fine, and my phone was still slowed down. I want the option to turn the slowdown off.
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I don't think that option is coming because if they give that option, much more people will have shut down issues. So, it is most likely here to stay now, sadly.
 
stevet said:
You’re right they did but just cause they pull more currrnt doesn’t mean the battery should degrade quicker unless the draw is near the danger zone for the battery. That’s most likely the cause of this, if you used apps that were always pulling hard on the battery then you probably ran into that problem of the phone shutting down early.
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It didn't DEGRADE QUICKER; it just Degraded normally. However, what was perfectly acceptable to a newish battery was UNEXPECTEDLY a problem for an older one.

As I said, it is not in the mindset of Product Design engineers to think about how a product will perform multiple-years down the road, unless they are designing a product like a switch or connector, where "number of operations" is a universally-considered spec.

Yes, everyone knows that batteries wear-out over time; but I can also easily see how exactly "how much" was overlooked, or not "weighted" enough, by the iPhone's Design Team. It's actually probably pretty difficult to accurately "model" or "simulate" EXACTLY how a aged LiOn battery will act. All you can do is build-in a fudge-factor and hope for the best.
 
nojkepop said:
I get it Apple could have been more clear about the changes they made to power management but that doesn't mean they were slowing peoples phones down get them to buy new ones.
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I doubt they were doing it to get people to buy new phones, but hey, that's surely a nice consequence :)

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel

And on a more serious note, see my other posts for technical (engineering) details on batteries
 
MacRumors said:

Keep in mind that Apple is not permanently or persistently slowing down older iPhones. Even if your iPhone is affected, the performance limitations only happen intermittently, and only when the device is completing demanding tasks.
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This one paragraph shows you have no understanding what so ever about this issue and is complete and utter crud!
My iPhone is throttled::

ALL THE TIME NO MATTER WHAT IT IS DOUNG AND IS MORE HEAVILY THROTTLED THE LOWER THE BATTERY CHARGE IS AGAIN REGARDLESS OF WHAT IT IS DOING!

The paragraph is a desperate attempt to apologise and defend Apple I think, you should be ashamed of yourselves, these lawsuites are just the beginning.
Personally I think once regulators around the globe start investigating this properly, they will find Apple in contempt of consumer rights and laws... then the fun will start..
 
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I remember my old iPhone 5 and 5s would drop to 5% battery power and NEVER shut off. What is this about phones suddenly shutting down after the power drained? I owned the iPhone 5 and 5s for 3 years between the two of them. Never had a sudden shutdown issue.
 
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It's not clear whether anyone here understands power management on a battery powered mobile device and what it takes to manage the battery. Unfortunately, you can only be an apple shill / fanboy or the so-called righteous on these threads, but I can assure you it isn't magic fairies that keeps your battery going. It's managing the power draw from your CPU and GPU and how applications interact with those components.

Every manufacturer manages the power draw on those components by a lot of sophisticated stuff including powering back CPU and GPU. This happens in very large data centers and it happens on your phone. All we know about what the other manufacturers do is they "don't do it like Apple." They've been surprisingly quiet otherwise. You can go look up a little bit about what Android does since it is open and relatively documented. I would suggest that Apple could definitely have managed this better and when they announced a year ago that they were doing things with power management to keep their phones from shutting down, they could have explained to those who care that power management means just what I said above.

And anyone who's sole reason for upgrading their devices is because their device slowed down...well...not sure what I can say there.

The unsubstantiated numbers (millions would have done this, or that) are just completely absurd and it is like everyone is lining up to get themselves a free phone when at best, should anyone prevail in any lawsuit, they'll get 5 bucks and a lot of happy lawyers in a non-life-threatening case like this. And I don't think a barclays analyst multiplying a percentage by iPhone numbers is terribly useful or accurate.
 
mi7chy said:
The simpler and proper method would've been to pop up a battery health notification allowing the owner to book an appointment to get the battery serviced and, optionally, run under throttled performance until the appointment date. The fact that there were no transparency nor attempt to fix the root cause with the defective battery proves malice.
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No it doesn't. It proves that Apple is fallable at GUESSING what their Users want, and don't want, to know.

And they ARE going to do pretty much EXACTLY that at this point.

For example, if you look at the log files of ANY OS, you will find dozens, if now hundreds, of scary-looking ERRORs. They happen ALL the time, and NO ONE ***EVER*** notifies the User.

Why? Because you wouldn't be able to use your computer/device if you had to look at EVERY scary-looking Error that your OS and Applications "throw".

Same thing here: Apple THOUGHT their "Throttling" would be instantaneous and infrequent. Turned out they MISCALCULATED.

Miscalculation is not Malice.
 
MacsRuleOthersDrool said:
No it doesn't. It proves that Apple is fallable at GUESSING what their Users want, and don't want, to know.

And they ARE going to do pretty much EXACTLY that at this point.

For example, if you look at the log files of ANY OS, you will find dozens, if now hundreds, of scary-looking ERRORs. They happen ALL the time, and NO ONE ***EVER*** notifies the User.

Why? Because you wouldn't be able to use your computer/device if you had to look at EVERY scary-looking Error that your OS and Applications "throw".

Same thing here: Apple THOUGHT their "Throttling" would be instantaneous and infrequent. Turned out they MISCALCULATED.

Miscalculation is not Malice.
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How many times? People don't have a problem with miscalculation. They have a problem with the cover up.
 
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H2SO4 said:
Maybe, maybe not. They have huge amounts of data from both the phones, the CPU manufacturers, (themselves?), and the battery manufacturers.
You know when you spec an ELU what you are supposed to do is spec the battery for 3 hours at the end of the battery life. Not three hours for a new battery.
I believe that Apple had an idea of how much their customers would use and how often they thought people would charge their phones, they could have asked and probably did, "Hi Mr. Battery Manufacturer. How long will this battery be expected to last under X conditions?". They got this part wrong. That's fine, we all get things wrong.
The cover up is where it all begins to stink.
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WHAT "cover up"? More like a "Typically vague Release-Note". BIG Difference.

And think about the MASSIVE application-envelope of something like an iPhone. There is literally NO WAY Apple could fuzz their usage-data to come up with anything more accurate than a statistical-mean, which would be WILDLY inaccurate for, well, a class-action-lawsuit's worth of users.

You're still ascribing Malice to Miscalculation.
 
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